Qualcomm's newly-announced Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip will beat at the heart of the very best Android phones that 2023 will have to offer. But it's already been outperformed by 2022's iPhone 14 Pro and the A16 Bionic.
The Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is expected to ship inside a number of flagship Android devices next year, with Samsung's very best Galaxy S offerings likely to attach globs of RAM and huge camera sensors to it. But in terms of raw performance, Apple already has it beat according to new benchmark numbers.
Not-so-fast, Qualcomm
Despite Qualcomm picking up iPhone 15 modem orders, the company is very much in competition with Apple's silicon team in terms of the processors that it sells to Android phone makers. The company announced the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 to much fanfare earlier this week, saying that it will offer improved performance over last year's iteration. And well it might, but it still won't beat the A16 Bionic.
New Geekbench tests of an unknown Vivo Android device running the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip give it a single-core score of 1483 and a multi-core score of 4709. Both are respectable scores by most measures, but they fall short of iPhone 14 Pro's 1874 single-core and 5372 multi-core results thanks to the A16 Bionic's beefy processing prowess.
Qualcomm's new chip is built on TSMC's 4nm manufacturing process, just like the A16 Bionic. That allows for improved power consumption and reduced heat, two things that Android buyers will be hoping for next year. Previous Qualcomm chips had been known for their toastiness, sometimes causing CPU and GPU throttling — especially during gaming sessions.
The iPhone 14 Pro Max is Apple's best iPhone in terms of gaming, thanks in part to its large screen but also the way it's able to offer strong performance for longer periods of time without throttling.
